News

No big long news posts this time, this should hopefully alleviate a lot of speed issues we've been having as of late.

I'll do a much longer writeup when it's all done (and when it's not 2AM) but hop into the Discord for sorta-on-the-fly updates and support.

Thanks for using s-ul!- Corin

Posted at 01:14 18th May 2020

16th Jul 2019

Hi Everyone!

Apologies for the recent server issues/downtime, this should hopefully address it also sorry for the long ass post.

The most recent (yesterday) issue was caused by me testing the waters on one of our masters (Nekomata) in order to
make sure the
upgrade goes smoothly.
While the upgrade went fine, the server came back up after a reboot, kernel updated, PHP updated to 7.3 etc and was
running fine for roughly a week, but it
seems a more recent reboot caused Apache to come back up without us noticing.

Previously our servers used to use Apache HTTPd to power s-ul, but very quickly once we grew, we started to see the
performance
implication and apache not being able to keep up with the requests; as a result this caused us to move to
nginx.
However, we never removed the apache2 package from Nekomata; we simply disabled the startup "just in case".
It looks like during the Buster upgrade however it's re-enabled it and as a result, users were presented with the
Apache default page for a period.

Second most recent was caused by the PHP7.3 update.
This was similar to a previous outage where the s-ul file cache filled up and basically crumbled.
Why? Because the cronjob pointed to /usr/bin/php7.1 instead of /usr/bin/php
.... and 7.1 had been uninstalled for 7.3, big brain moves right there.

Third most recent was caused by our SSL certificate expiring.
This is your standard "SSL cert expired whoops" kinda outage. Usually I'm on top of this but it slipped by me this
month.

Generally LE can auto-renew, but wildcard LE certs require certain DNS updates every time, and as we host our own
nameservers and have roughly 7 servers in s-uls infrastructure... it gets a little tricky.
It's something I'm still looking into fixing up automation wise but we're getting there!

The fourth and reoccurring issue is our DNSSEC signatures expire monthly.
This is something I don't really have an excuse for, I keep forgetting to automate this and get sidetracked onto
other items.

Another thing I wanted to address is the inactivity/lack of news.
The reason for that is there's not much newsworthy going on behind the scenes, we're all still busy working on other projects mostly!
s-ul is still very much alive though and still my baby, we've currently been thinking of ways we can improve the
service and what would make extras/credits more appealing to users as well.
In the coming days I'll be making a news post with a user satisfaction survey (it'll be short, don't worry) and a Discord invite link for
support/users to chat.

One thing I didn't address (and should have as it was fixed a month after the problem started), we re-enabled potentially malicious formats.
Now users will be presented with a middleman warning page for certain file formats to allow users to be sure what
they're downloading is what they're expecting.
You can see this in action here: https://corin.s-ul.eu/Fw1S02U8

tl;dr stuff went boom because of system upgrades and ssl certs mostly, also I suck at updating you guys.

As always, thanks for sticking around and using s-ul!
- Corin

Posted at 11:44 16th Jul 2019

23rd Feb 2018

Hi all!

We've been quiet recently due to us being busy with other projects, but that's not to say we've not been working
behind the scenes!

One new thing is, due to higher demand, we've recently (like 3 months ago) added a new master to s-ul (wac), so
hopefully since then you've seen a boost in performance.
We've also changed the way the caching system works recently too meaning bigger files will be faster to load on
first access.

Unfortunately, we've seen a massive rise in s-ul being abused for spreading malware and the likes, and as such, until
we can figure out a permanent solution for protecting users against viruses and the like, the following file
formats will not be downloadable by users: .msi, .scr, .exe, .com, .jar.
Uploads for these files will still work, however downloads will be blocked and users will be greeted with a 404
error.
We didn't really want to have to do this but unfortunately there's not much else we can really do until we have a
proper system in place.

We hope you understand this and once we have an update on the way this system works, an update post will be made
announcing the changes.

Another thing we've been neglecting is support tickets (100% my fault, been extremely busy moving and keep forgetting
to follow them up) so I'll get those wrapped up in the coming few days.

We've got a few things on the TODO list such as restoring the ability to reset your API key on request (was a feature
that we forgot to port over) and a few other things, so hopefully you'll get to see those soon. :)

As always, thanks for using s-ul!
- Corin

Posted at 11:05 23rd Feb 2018

17th Jul 2017

Hi all!

Apologies for the 1 hour of not being able to serve some files randomly, the issue was caused by changes we made last night to enable caching on the master (been disabled for a while so response times/download speeds were slightly slower).

Long story short, I forgot to add the cron job for the cache cleanup, causing the master to fill up and stop being able to cache newly requested files.

We had created a failsafe if this were to ever happen and to serve files directly from the slave as usual, however, unfotunately this failed so people were just greeted with an nginx 404 page.

All should be stable now however and we've fixed the failsafe in case this ever happens again.

Sorry for any inconvenience caused and thanks for using s-ul!

- Corin

Posted at 10:54 17th Jul 2017

6th Jul 2017

Hi all!

Just a small anouncement for two new features and explain the three odd 10 minute downtimes that happened over the past few days.

For the downtime, short and sweet, it was literally DNS issues.
For some reason the master couldn't resolve the slave using the DNS servers we had previously used for whatever reason.
Upon changing them to Google DNS, they worked again and that was the end of that for the first two times.
The third outage was caused by me being an idiot when fixing the nameserver issue properly, typoing the IP address in the server's interfaces file and rebooting networking.

This kills the s-ul.

As for the neato new features, we now have the much requested (but we kept forgetting to implement it) "Select All" action in Files.
Took us two years to remember to do it but here we are.
The other new feature is the addition of a dark theme which you can enable in the Preferences section of your Account page.

We'd also like to remind our users that no matter how desperate times get, we'll never remove hotlinking or implement tracking in our image serving.We'd like to announce the third new feature however implement watermark ads that cover 99% of your images while charging a measly $500 per year to remove it! :^)

Once again, thanks for using s-ul!
-Corin

Posted at 00:04 6th Jul 2017

29th Jun 2017

Hi all!

2 new updates to the site!

If you have ever bought credits for s-ul; along with being able to set an index and 404 page, you can now add custom domains via your Account settings!

The first: On July 1st, we will be deleting the old DNS record for n2.sys.s-ul.eu.

For most, this will not affect you, however, if you use n2.sys.s-ul.eu to visit the website or in an old custom uploader config; from the 1st onwards you will not be able to view the site or upload files.

To mitigate this, please visit the site using https://s-ul.eu and either use the built in s-ul uploader in ShareX or update your custom uploader configs using the updated versions in your accounts.

The other major but not really major but still cool anyway thing is: Default directories are now fixed and settable.

Once again thanks for using s-ul! :)
- Corin

Posted at 15:30 22nd Jun 2017

17th Jun 2017

Aaaand another bug fixed!

Due to a db schema issue, people were unfortunately unable to confirm their accounts.

This should now be rectified, all you will need to do is follow the link again and your account will be confirmed.

Apologies for the inconvenience!
- Corin

Posted at 20:00 17th Jun 2017

16th Jun 2017

Quick update, 2 big bugs fixed and 2 smaller ones.

reCAPTCHA is now fixed on the contact form and on registration (that's what doing deploys at 11PM gets me).

For smaller bugs, thanks to 2 users for pointing out that viewing a folder without a slug was broken and a would generate an extra / when uploaded to.

We're aware that you're unable to change your default directory at the moment and are working to fix this.

Thanks again for using s-ul!
- Corin

Posted at 16:45 16th Jun 2017

15th Jun 2017

Welcome to s-ul 2017!

We've spent a long time working on it but it's here at last!
We've switched from the ancient old framework (or rather lack of) to our inhouse one meaning we can make updates/upgrades a lot easier now, we've also decided to deviate a little from the old teased screenshots!

Please note, if you used a custom domain, you will need to update it from an A record to a CNAME record and point it to no-ssl.sys.s-ul.eu.
If you do not do this, your files will be inaccessible.

Please note also that your thumbnails may not exist yet, this is because thumbnails are still generating in the background (around about 1M to go as of 23:37BST).

While this is all new and shiny, there will be bugs here and there so if you do encounter any, please let us know via the contact form and we'll get it fixed ASAP.

s-ul now uses a master/slave type system so things might be slow for now.
We're monitoring this to make sure it doesn't get too bad but right now we're guaging the amount of usage before we deploy more masters but as of now, it's just Nekomata (Master) and Nagisa (Slave).

With this also, a lot of old small silly bugs/missing features were implemented and/or fixed, such as being unable to change your email address (I only realised this was missing after it was pointed out a few months ago), being unable to delete directories and being unable to register using an email address with a + in it.

All in all, we hope you enjoy using s-ul 2017 as much as we did building it. :)

- Corin

Stats of now:

Registered users: 3074
Files hosted: 1,042,527
Storage used: 528GB

Posted at 23:33 15th Jun 2017

14th Jun 2017

We're currently waiting for an update from our host before we can put it live so stay tuned!-Corin

Posted at 14:41 14th Jun 2017

29th May 2017

s-ul will be down for upgrades at _some_ point between today/tonight and Sunday next weekend.
The outage shouldn't last long hopefully, however, they're exciting updates. :)

Hopefully everyone enjoys it once it is released, but if there are any issues, please let us know via the contact form.

As usual, thanks for using s-ul! :)
- Corin

Posted at 17:57 29th May 2017

4th Apr 2017

Whoops! There was a brief period where people could not upload files.This was caused by a drive (backup drive) not being mounted when it should have been.Sorry about that!

Posted at 19:04 4th Apr 2017

4th Mar 2017

Just had a 5 minute outage due to rebooting the box for security updates, sorry about that!

Posted at 19:53 4th Mar 2017

6th Oct 2016

Hi all! New version time again along with a huge news post!

With this version comes payments and a load of UI changes.

Hopefully everyone finds the UI changes to their liking. Things that were here before are still here now however
they should now all be under the "account" menu option.

We're using a credit based system as virtual currency allows us to make plans cheaper and lower the amount of code required to make it all tick along nicely (like upgrade refunding handling, downgrade handling and so on).

We've priced plans and credits to what we feel is fair. With s-ul we've always had a quality over quantity mindset, and if we were to offer things like unlimited storage we'd have to sacrifice a lot in terms of stability, performance and other things.

Fear not though, everything will continue to work how it all worked before, the initial GB you get from signing up is free and always will be.

If you have had your capacity boosted by another member of staff before, you will retain that boost even if you upgrade/downgrade.

One thing I forgot to announce before is that the file manager now has a search feature to easily search for files.

It searches against the original name you submitted the file with and is a LIKE search, meaning if you want to look for all mp3's in your account, all you have to enter is "mp3".

We have also now added a Terms of Service to the website, please review it here.

Your continued use of the service will signify that you have read and agree to our ToS.

We hope you enjoy using this version of s-ul as much as we have building it.

As always if you have any questions, please feel free to send us a message via the contact form.

Thank you everyone for being a part of s-ul. :)

- Corin

Stats of now:

Registered users: 1,608
Files hosted: 438,424
Storage used: 238.67GB

Posted at 00:53 6th Oct 2016

13th Aug 2016

We've just pushed another update!We've fixed not being able to add directories (whoops, accidentally broke it) and made some modifications to the way captcha verification works.If you encounter any reCAPTCHA check errors or any other general errors, please submit them from the Contact Us page or email us at support(at)s-ul.eu and let us know! Thanks!

Posted at 23:10 13th Aug 2016

30th Jul 2016

We've just been notified about an issue with reCAPTCHA on the website causing registrations and contact form submissions to fail.This should be fixed now, sorry for any inconvenience this caused!

Posted at 19:54 30th Jul 2016

6th Jun 2016

Aaaaand we just pushed a pretty big change :) We now track hit counts on files! To see how many hits a file has got, simply hover over it in the File Manager.You can see a combined hit total in the Status section of the site.

Posted at 23:33 6th Jun 2016

2nd Jun 2016

We've just released a new version of s-ul!There are no real visible changes; the biggest and most prominent one is the addition to be able to upload images from a mobile device!We also hit a milestone about a week ago; we're officially hit the 200k files mark (now at 227,668).Thanks again for your help in making this possible!

Posted at 12:00 2nd Jun 2016

17th Apr 2016

As of today all new registrations for s-ul will have HTTPS enabled by default.Old users will slowly have SSL enabled on their domains in the future.If you wish to get priority just send us a message via the contact form requesting it.

Posted at 18:00 17th Apr 2016

25th Feb 2016

On Sunday we officially hit 500 users!This is an amazing accomplishment and a huge milestone for us so we've given every user an extra GB capacity as a thanks for making this happen :)

Posted at 12:43 25th Feb 2016

27th Jan 2016

We're currently performing a few modifications to the way s-ul works server side. As a result, s-ul is currently in readonly mode. Sorry for any inconvenience caused! Should only take aprox 30 mins or so. While you wait, follow us on twitter! @seionuploadAll done!

Posted at 00:55 27th Jan 2016

25th Oct 2015

After finally working out the few bugs we're happy to release the latest version of s-ul! Included in this version is a few visual fixes and the addition of directories.

Posted at 01:01 25th Oct 2015

15th Sep 2015

Due to a bug, recent accounts were not able to be used due to the domain not registering. This has since been rectified, apologies for any inconvenience this caused.